Donate KSM or USDC-p to Encointer communities directly — no intermediaries, no custody

Ecosystem
1

After almost a year of slowly burning down our reserves and failed attempts to get continued treasury funding (645, 636), the Encointer Association decided to stop subsidising its communities. The Association will continue sustaining the network (collator, RPC, monitoring) for the foreseeable future based on pro-bono work, but Encointer’s local communities — the actual people meeting up every 10 days to mint and circulate their grassroots currency — no longer have a reliable funding source or backup reserve.

Building a healthier funding base means turning to the people who care most about local resilience. So we built a donation dapp that lets anyone on Polkadot route funds directly into a community’s treasuries, with as little middleware and trust as practically possible:

:link: Try it: Encointer Cross-Chain Dapp > donate (or unstoppable on IPFS)
:hammer_and_wrench: Code: github or radicle

Why “trustless and direct” isn’t marketing fluff here

There is no central pot, no foundation account, no manual disbursement controlled by any person or entity. When you donate:

  1. You select faucets (for KSM, to drip to proven unique humans) and/or community treasuries (for USDC, held in democratically goverened community treasuries on KAH).
  2. The beneficiary is a runtime-derived keyless account per community — anyone can re-derive it from the community ID, no human-controlled proxy multisig in the path. The same account proof is shown in the UI before you confirm.
  3. A single signed extrinsic gets the funds where they need to go — XCM does the heavy lifting if you’re not on the destination chain.

No custodial step, no signing service, no off-chain bookkeeping. The recipient is whatever the runtime says it is by its auditable design.

To learn how community treasuries work once the funds are there, watch:

What the dapp actually does

  • Donate USDC (cross-consensus from PAH or directly on KAH) to one or more community treasuries — weighted by recent community activity.
  • Donate KSM to attestation-reward faucets that drip KSM directly into reputable attendees’ accounts, onboarding people to Kusama without the need for ID’s, KYC or a bank account.
  • For your convenience, the dapp also supports Plain transfers between Encointer / KAH / PAH for KSM, DOT and USDC.

Why Donate?

Both african communities are located in regions where daily income ranges in the single dollars for many. Even your smallest donation will have a positive impact on peoples lives and the growth of the web3-savvy community. In contrast to other donation rails, fees are low and intermediaries are zero.

Get to know our communities:

If you’ve been looking for a tangible UBI / grassroots-currency experiment to put money behind — and you wanted that money to land in the actual community treasury rather than a “community fund” controlled by a foundation — this is the most direct path we’ve been able to build.

Feedback, PRs, and bug reports very welcome.

— the Encointer team

2

Thank you to the Encointer team for their continued commitment to sustaining the network despite the challenges of securing ongoing treasury funding. As a community, we recognize that the end of subsidies marks an important transition. While external support has helped us grow, long-term resilience depends on our ability to strengthen local economic activity, governance, and community participation. The launch of this donation dapp creates a direct and transparent way for supporters to contribute to community development, ensuring that resources reach the people and treasuries they are intended to support.

For communities like Nyota in Tanzania, these contributions can make a meaningful difference. Beyond supporting grassroots currencies, they help create opportunities for financial inclusion, digital literacy, entrepreneurship, and community-led development. Every contribution, regardless of size, has the potential to support real people working to improve their livelihoods through cooperative action and Web3 technology.

We encourage members of the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem and supporters of decentralized social innovation to learn more about the communities involved and consider supporting this initiative. The true strength of these communities has always been its people, and this next chapter is an opportunity for communities and supporters to build that future together.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed, collaborated, and believed in this vision.

3

As part of the team behind PayNuq Nigeria, I want to thank the Encointer team for not only building the infrastructure but also continuing to sustain it despite funding challenges.

For our community, Encointer has been more than a blockchain protocol. It has enabled us to bring people together, onboard local businesses, facilitate real transactions, experiment with community-driven economic activity, and introduce many participants to Web3 through practical use rather than speculation.

Like any grassroots initiative, we have faced challenges. Yet even through those challenges, we’ve seen businesses accept PayNuq, community members buy and spend it, and local economic relationships strengthen.

The new donation dApp is especially meaningful because support can now flow directly to the communities creating impact on the ground. For communities like ours, every contributions can help sustain participation, strengthen local economic activity, and create opportunities for growth.

To everyone who has supported Encointer so far, thank you. From where we stand, the impact is real, and we’re excited to continue building.

Exciting times ahead.